360DigitalInfluence

Ok, not really. But there is a terrific intersection between the pressures for consumer driven healthcare and the emergence of consumer generated media. One is driven by market economics, the other by technology-empowered people.

Two manifestations of this intersection include the recent Health 2.0 conference. This brought together Web 2.0 companies in the health space, more traditional healthcare companies and people - many of them established voices on,ine like Amy Tenderich of DiabetesMine.com.

Check out the video above that sums up the conference.  You will see Amy there.

Then check out my interview with Amy. One of the questions I asked her included:

Me: You have wrestled with a chronic condition in the established healthcare system, established a independent voice in the patient and healthcare “community”, just attended Health 2.0 - what do you think the 3 biggest changes are afoot for healthcare as a result of digital innovations?

Amy: Lots of changes are on the horizon, based on everything I heard at the forward-looking Health 2.0 conference.   Three “movements” of note are:

Changed RELATIONSHIPS – all these interactive tools on the Internet provide patients with information, choices, and a public voice never imaginable before. As a result, our relationships with each other, and with our doctors and our healthcare insurance plans are changing.    When a patient goes to see their doctor armed with detailed questions about the new diabetes drug Januvia, for example, they not only help themselves, but also the entire patient community, by prodding that doctor to know the latest and greatest.   All of that doctor’s other patients will benefit from this as well.   The patient also changes their relationship with the doctor from a passive teacher-student dynamic to more of a partnership.

The PERSONALIZATION of medicine – part of the movement is doing away with the “cookie-cutter” approach to medicine, because experience shows that individual patients can respond quite differently to the same dose of the same drug. Through molecular analysis, we’re now able to identify genetic markers that help determine each individual’s health needs. The experts tell me it won’t be too long until we’ll go visit our clinicians, undergo genetic testing, and then get handed a miniature hard drive containing our personal genome sequence, which can later be uploaded onto publicly accessible databases. Sounds like science fiction, but it is in fact already happening.

An OPEN MARKET approach to health – visionaries actually foresee “disengagement of the employer as the healthcare payer” which will “open up a whole new market.”   In a free consumer healthcare market, we might use something like a FICO score (rating of your financial credit) to rate your personal health.   The better your health, the higher your score, and it would be your doctor’s job to help you raise that score.   If your doctor doesn’t help you improve your score, that would be good grounds to find another doctor.   Under this model, doctors would be directly accountable for the care they give, and patients would do a lot of shopping around!